Isn’t it amazing how the weeks fly by? It seems no time at all since I was sitting in the garden marking student assignments and wondering how to occupy myself over the summer.

Sunny days are not conducive to sitting at the computer, so it’s out into the fresh air to cut back rampant vegetation which has sprouted in the warm weather.

Suddenly it’s August, and copy for the flyers advertising my autumn courses has arrived and needs reading. I’m starting to think about lesson-planning for September.

But before I do, I’ll just do a quick review of images added to my picture collection.

But that’s the trouble, film cards are just too large nowadays. It’s just so easy to keep piling the pics on to the multi gigabyte card and never deleting anything. Forget the garden, I need to prune my pics.

At the moment I’m looking for some illustrations on taking close-up images. You could be forgiven for thinking it was simple and that all you had to do was switch the camera into the macro mode and snap away.

This is pretty much what I did with the picture of the seaweed. Strong winds had ripped long skeins of strange looking plants from the seabed.

I was fascinated with the goose-pimpled flotation devices and the pleated shapes of the brown stalks spread along the beach. It looked like an invasion of aliens.

Trouble is I don’t know whether I’ll need these images for anything, although now I come to look again, I’ve spotted my dog’s paw prints in the background and so can’t bear to trash it.

The portrait of the three spot ladybird I met on a cliff path took a little longer to get right. Camera set on macro - steady, point, shoot - and review - and oh bother! At my first attempt, the camera focussed on the rock at the back.

So the second time I hold a stick just the right distance away from the camera lens, half-depress the shutter to lock focus on the stick, swivel the camera back to the bug - and shoot. Perfect this time.

I like using the macro setting (the one with the tulip symbol) to focus on an object in the near foreground, while still giving the viewer a sense of the landscape beyond.

I took my first couple of these type of shots while on holiday a few years ago and liked the results. Here’s one I like of some cow parsley seed heads taken just last week. I had three attempts at this composition, but like this one without the sky the best.

It was starting to rain as I took this shot, but without the sky you focus on the white spot of the cottage and the soft grey light produces a wonderful array of greens and blues.

How close can you get to the object on the macro setting? It is useful to know. My last shot is of a friendly local, also taken in the last week.

My encounter with inquisitive Lake District livestock would have been too close for comfort, but for the fence.

I was also glad that she only breathed on my lens and didn’t stick her tongue out to lick the camera - now that really would have been up close and personal!